Google AdSense : Java Glossary

The CurrCon Java Applet displays prices on this
web page converted with today’s exchange rates into your local international currency,
e.g. Euros, US dollars, Canadian dollars, British Pounds, Indian Rupees…
CurrCon requires an up-to-date browser
and Java version 1.8, preferably 1.8.0_131.
If you can’t see the prices in your local currency,
Troubleshoot. Use Firefox for best results.

Google’s affiliate scheme to pay you for putting ads on your website where
you get paid per click. The ads at the top and bottom of each page on this website
are managed by Google AdSense.

Click throughs on those ads generates the revenues that pay the
ISP (Internet Service Provider)
bills for mindprod.com. They also fund Google to the tune of $16 billion a year. This is what pays the bills for the free Google
search engines.

Advantages

Most of the time Google selects ads for your space that are relevant to the
content. They usually interesting to your readers.

Google AdSense is one of the few affiliate programs worth the effort. Unlike most other
advertising and affiliate schemes, you actually make substantial income and with
minimal effort.

There are three basic schemes for getting paid for advertising.

Percentage of sale.

Per click through.

Per impression. You get paid just to show the ad, even if the reader
totally ignores it.

AdSense pays on click through. You get paid for curious readers whether they
buy or not.

You can put up to three banners per page and if the banners are big enough,
sometimes multiple ads will fit in a banner. They are popular because they are very
easy to set up. You just put a standard piece of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language)
on your page that tells Google the size of ad you want and they take it from
there.

You don’t have to sell advertising space. Google does that for you.

You don’t have to bill advertisers. Google does that for you.

You don’t have modify HTML
to insert new ads.

You don’t have to select which products to advertise or where to
optimally place the ads.

You can use the same web page real estate for hundreds of different
advertisers.

Using the same canned HTML, you can display different ads on every page.

Google automatically figures out which ads generate the most revenue in which
spots and rotates them for you.

There is almost no work to setting it up, just register and insert a block of
JavaScript wherever you want an ad to appear. Then stand back and wait for the
monthly cheques.

You can block ads from objectionable companies.

Disadvantages

Companies you don’t endorse advertise on your site. The ads imply your
approval when it is not there. They are usually not bad enough to bother blocking,
or present long enough to bother blocking.

How It Works

Google pays you for placing most ads on a CPC (Cost Per Click)
basis. When advertisers target your particular website or webpage, they pay on a
CPM (Cost Per thousand/Mille impressions)
basis. You, as the displayer of the ad, will get something in the order of
$.10 USD
to
$1.50 USD
per click based on your natural ranking, an advertising
desirability measure.

The rate you get per click is a the result of an automatic auction between
advertisers for the right to advertise to your site or your keywords. You get an
undisclosed percentage of what the advertiser pays.

You must, of course, register as an affiliate first or they won’t know where
to mail the cheque.

I keep the ads off the high traffic pages since they can slow down loading and, if
Google is unreachable, can freeze the loading entirely. I have written Google
repeatedly about the problem. There is also a problem using the website offsite when
the ad content is not available. Google JavaScript needs to suppress the ad if when
you are offline or if the ad does not appear within a few seconds. It should not hold
up the entire page. For now, you have to turn off JavaScript for offline viewing of
my web pages.

Ads can only appear on pages that Google spiders, so they must be open to
robots.txt and appear in your optional
sitemap. Google needs to examine their
content to select relevant ads.

Rant

I really don’t like Google Adsense. If ever there is a replacement, I will switch.
My biggest complaint is Adsense sends me cryptic emails, complaining about some page on my website but
without telling me what the specific problem is. They refuse to let me send emails asking for
clarification. They only complain about pages with no Google Adsense ads on them. Here are some examples:

They complained about a random page of the King James bible.

They complained about a picture of a boy eating a banana. They said it was too obscene.

They complained about a page about Abu Ghraib.

They demanded that I reformat all pages to make them mobile friendly. They offered no documentation to define what that meant. They offered no example pages.
They offered no tools for the conversion.

Tweaks

There are a few tweaks with JavaScript you can do to o speed up AdSense:

Load show_ads.js from your own website rather than
Google’s http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js.

Suppress the ads in Opera since they make Opera hang.

Suppress the ads when the page is loaded locally from hard disk since they slow
down local access so much.

To see how it works, look at the code to invoke the ads at the top and bottom of
each page and the JavaScript in http://mindprod.com/embellishment/javascripttools.js. Basically I
load the Google scripts dynamically only when I discover I am not in Opera and not
viewing a document loaded from hard disk. I use the same trick for Google AdSense and
Google Translate.

Google improves the markup for the ads from time to time. The old markup will
work, but the new is generally faster or terser.